


Defining Who We Are

by Silex



Category: Prototype (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, No Plot/Plotless, Post-Canon, Pseudo-Incest, Unhealthy Relationships, Weird Biology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-25 22:12:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14388168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: She's all that matters to him, the center of his world, the one thing he defines himself by. But that's not who he wants to be. Telling the truth would ruin everything because their connection, like everything else, is so fragile. The lies hurt, but maintain a safe distance.She thinks that he's her brother and if that's what she needs...





	Defining Who We Are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HostisHumaniGeneris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/gifts).



> All I can say is that I wish that there were more fics in this fandom and I'm glad that this exchange gave me the excuse to finally write something for it.

Dana had regarded him as her missing brother, the one that had abandoned her and then returned to bring the end of the world to her doorstep. She forgave him for it, though it really wasn’t him that she’d forgiven, it was the memory of her dead brother.

And the more he learned about who he was, the man he’d been, the less he wanted to be that man. The original Alexander J. Mercer had been a monster, far worse than the creature that had been spawned from his cooling corpse. He’d been the one willing to release the virus, to kill everyone in the city, including Dana, for…what?  He didn’t know, never would. Alex Mercer’s plan, if there had even been a plan had been lost when the man died and there was no recovering that particular puzzle piece.

Not that he wanted to. He didn’t want to understand the rational of the monster that had created him, had no need to grasp the inner workings of a sociopath.

In the end, what it came down to was that he had no desire to be Alex Mercer, but it wasn’t an identity that he could abandon. Not because he had any attachment to the name or the face, though it was the first, it was simply one of many disguises worn by the Blacklight virus, but because of Dana.

She saw him as her beloved older brother, though he couldn’t understand why. She wasn’t the nostalgic sort and with everyone else she was unforgiving and uniformly critical. Everywhere she looked, everyone she spoke to, she saw ulterior motives, but her brother was her one blind spot. In her mind he could do no wrong, her brother had done nothing wrong.

And he hadn’t told her otherwise.

Because he didn’t want to lose her.

Dana was the one good thing, the one thing that mattered in his existence, a constant where nothing else was certain.

He had saved Manhattan, not out of concern for humanity, but for Dana and for spite. The original Alex Mercer had tried to kill the city, kill humanity, and Blackwatch was working to finish what the man had started, he acted to deny them both. It was how he defined himself, by what he wasn’t.

Dana though, she defined him by her own mistaken impressions.

She thought he was her brother and he’d done nothing to dispel that notion. To the contrary, he strove to be the best brother to her that he could, better than the one that she remembered, the one that had abandoned her.

He was the one that had rescued her, kept her safe in the hellhole that Manhattan had become until the infection began to die off in winter’s cold and things finally started getting better. By late summer the quarantine was lifted and they were able to slip away.

And she knew it too, on some level she understood that the change wasn’t just him turning over a new leaf, that he might not be the brother that she remembered.

It was a good thing, because he had no desire to be that man.

Had no desire to be her brother, because that was a role that had already been filled by Alex Mercer, a name and face he begrudgingly worse because to abandon them would be to abandon Dana.

Just as the man that had been her brother had done.

For how much he hated the man he gave a great deal of consideration to what Alex Mercer would have done so that he could do something else. Increasingly it became how he defined himself, what would Alexander Mercer not do?

Telling Dana the truth was an obvious one, something that took him longer than he wanted to admit to make up his mind on. The risk of doing it wrong and losing Dana was too great and she was the other thing that he used to define himself. So he waited, carefully built the trust between them in countless small ways. She was allowed to pick where they went, what they did there, the story they used.

Since she knew what he was capable of to some degree and understood that he was a wanted man, that just being around him was dangerous, he would disguise himself when they traveled, using different names and faces, whatever best corroborated the story she made up for them. With all he could do, the countless ways he could change himself and everything he knew from everyone he had consumed, he still had difficulty coming up with new ideas. Lies beyond the most blatant deception didn’t come easily to him, so mostly he just didn’t talk about things. Dana didn’t like it, but he feared that the alternative would be worse.

There were so many different people he could be, but because Dana wanted, needed, him to be Alex Mercer, that was who he was most often. In time though she grew used to the other disguises, picked favorites and would request them for different situations. It was a relief – to be someone else for any length of time, for her not to call him Alex or brother.

He was fine being her brother, if only he could be a new one, a different one.

That wasn’t ever going to happen though. Dana’s mind was too set on things. Alex was her brother. He was Alex. There was nothing he could do to change that, or so he told himself.

Even if she didn’t fully understand, she was starting to accept him for what he was, skewed as it was by who she thought he was.

The first real progress, though he hadn’t seen it as progress at the time, just Dana being curious, came during a night where they weren’t staying at a hotel. Dana was asleep, sprawled out across the back seat of the car and he was driving because he didn’t need to sleep. When she wasn’t awake he drove in silence, radio off, windows rolled down just enough to hear the wind. It helped him think, or maybe relax, being alone with his thoughts or trying to keep his mind blank. He supposed that was the closest he got to sleeping, letting his mind go blank and functioning like he was on autopilot. Driving made it easy because there was something for him to do, it took just enough concentration that he was able to let it be the only thing he thought about.

“Pull over,” Dana said quietly, interrupting his not-thinking.

Assuming that she just wanted to stretch her legs, he found an area that seemed as good as any, a wide grassy patch near the shoulder of the road. It was late, they were in the middle of nowhere and it had been close to an hour since he’d last seen another car.

Instead of getting out when he parked she leaned over into the front seat and looked at him.

“Your eyes are wrong,” she flatly, “When I sit just right I can see the reflection of them in the rearview mirror. The way the light hits them, it’s not right. There’s a lot about you that’s pretty fucked up. Sorry, messed up, sorry…”

He hated it when she apologized for noticing the obvious, but if he said anything to reassure her it would only make things worse and she’d never say what it was that she was thinking and they’d never make any progress. He couldn’t bring it up, so it would have to be her.

He motioned for her to continue, able to see her perfectly clearly despite how dark it was. Her not knowing that helped, she thought he couldn’t tell how difficult this was for her just because she was working to keep her voice even. Her face though was a mask of worry.

She didn’t know that he knew, didn’t know what he knew.

Couldn’t know.

At least not yet.

“Okay, it just had me thinking, I’ve seen some things, you know, the freaky shit that you can do.”

He smiled to let her know he wasn’t offended, because he wasn’t. Why would he be upset by her stating the obvious? She had seen some of it, a few times there had been cause for him to change the disguise he was using when she was around, rather than waiting for her to leave the room or finding some place away from her. So she knew that he could effortlessly change his appearance, but that was only a small part of it.

“I was thinking,” she repeated, her voice barely above a whisper, “About some of the stuff I saw, videos and things, from back during…”

He knew, or had a pretty good idea at least judging by how afraid she sounded. He didn’t want to hear her sound that afraid when talking to him, or about him.

“I don’t want to be afraid of you, but,” her voice quavered, “I think I need to see it. Fucked up as it is, I need to see because I’m sick of being afraid of, not you, but I don’t know, what you are. Alex, I don’t want you hiding things from me. Not after everything.”

That was a lie, not that she knew or understood, she did want him hiding things from her and he went out of his way to facilitate that lie, still showing her was a step in the right direction.

If there was a right direction.

He started simple, with claws because from his point of view they were the least drastic change, the smallest shift in form and redistribution of mass. Flesh squirmed and hardened, bones shifted and lengthened, emerging and growing sharp as fingers fused and grew thicker, muscle shifting and growing dense, giving him the strength to back what he was capable of doing when he used those claws.

Dana watched, growing pale, but not saying a word. When the changes were done she looked at him, silently questioning.

He nodded and she reached out, ran a hand along the back of his arm, looking for the delineation between armor and clothing and flesh. There was none, just a fluid transition from leather to organic armor.

“Can I?” She reached out, hand shaking.

He held his hand out to her.

She ran a finger along one of the spines, tracing it from tip to base, tapped a nail against one of his claws and then jerked her hand back.

He let his hands return to normal, or what Dana considered normal. Claws or hands, it was the same to him, but she had her ideas of normal and that was what he tried to conform to.

She reached out again, gave his hand a gentle squeeze, moving her fingers, probably checking for any trace of claws or armor and finding none.

“Fucking weird,” she whispered so softly that she probably didn’t think he heard, and then curled back up on the seat.

Back to driving, but progress had been made.

A small step, but over time those small steps would accumulate.

Later, weeks or months, it was a hot night in a motel somewhere in the desert because she’d said that she needed open spaces for a change, cities and trees and people were making her anxious. It was all the same to him, but if the change of scenery made her happy he would go along with it.

She lay in the bed, he stood by the window, looking out into the night. There were storm clouds in the distance, rumbling with thunder, but no rain. It was all sound and light. Dana’s eyes were open, maybe she was watching the pointless storm as well, but she hadn’t said anything so he hadn’t either.

He didn’t think that he was supposed to know that she was still awake.

She sat up and punched her pillow, “You can’t sleep either, huh?”

“I don’t sleep much.”

But she knew that already, they were just going through the motions, an act that they both kept up for her benefit. It was all about her, not that she understood that yet.

Eventually, maybe.

“Sit down at least.”

He humored her, pulling the battered chair away from the desk and sitting down so that he was facing her.

Sometimes when she was asleep he would watch her, listen to her breathe, see the way her eyelids would flutter and then she’d move and make small, anxious, sounds. Dreaming, he understood the idea, but had never experienced it for himself. Didn’t want to either, not when most of her dreams seemed to trouble her, even if she claimed not to remember.

He’d been curious about her dreams at first, just because it was such a strange and familiar thought. He had the memory of dreams, but they were something he was incapable of by nature.

“Over here, next to me so we can talk,” she patted the bed to make her point clear.

They could talk fine from where he was, but that didn’t matter. She wanted him closer.

Older brother comforting his little sister when she couldn’t sleep. A common enough trend in his memories. Dana was old for that sort of thing, but she’d been through a lot and stress did that to people.

He sat down next to her, but she didn’t talk, at least not much. A few comments about how the desert wasn’t what she’d expected, too hot and dry, and there was so much sky that looking out at it felt like falling and she hated the feeling of falling.

To him the feeling of falling was a feeling the same as any other, holding no special significance, but if she was afraid of falling or open spaces those weren’t exactly uncommon fears. He looked through the memories he’d acquired in what she probably mistook for a thoughtful silence and maybe it was, then repeated some comforting comments that seemed to help.

She leaned against him and she didn’t ask him to move so when she fell asleep, still leaning against him, he stayed where he was, listening to her breathing and feeling it.

He wondered if the original Alex Mercer, her real brother, had ever done this for her.

There were no nightmares that night.

More driving, back up north because she wanted snow for the winter, maybe not all winter, but for most of it or some of it or for at least a few weeks.

They ended up in a college town, on a weekend. It wasn’t intentional, they’d both lost track of the days, but it worked out because she’d wanted to spend time with people her age, people she thought she could relate to. Because if everything hadn’t happened she’d still be going to college.

He picked a younger looking disguise, one that she’d requested. She did that now, asked him to wear specific appearances, or not use certain ones. If there was a pattern to it he hadn’t figured it out yet, but he went along with it. Just going along was easier.

Following Dana’s lead they found a bar and mingled, or Dana mingled and he sat in a corner watching her.

It soon became clear that her intent wasn’t to mingle, or if it had been at the start it changed quickly.

The people she met, ordinary college students having a good time and not caring about anything more than maybe final exams coming up or a professor that was especially worthy of talking trash about, were not people she could relate to. Like him she could go through the motions, figure out the right things to say at the right time, but it was meaningless. She played at being a college student out drinking and having fun the same way he played at being her brother.

Or her friend. He supposed that he was playing at being her friend that night, a role he liked more than brother.

When Dana’s goal went from talking and drinking and having fun to just drinking to have fun he moved a bit closer, spooked a particularly gregarious young man off with a glare, and kept an eye on her.

No reason for him to worry, but no harm in him being protective.

Especially when the having fun became secondary to getting drunk.

That was when he sat next to her, making it clear that she’d come with him and would be leaving with him.

“That’s right,” Dana had the sense to say when the subject was broached, “He’s my date tonight.”

He was fine with that.

Alex Mercer would never have, could never have dated Dana.

Because a brother was never a date.

It brought him a step farther away from what he didn’t want to be.

“I don’t drive so I’m the designated drinker,” she’d joked, standing up, stumbling and sitting down on his lap.

He’d helped hold her steady as she finished her drink, then he suggested that they leave.

Thoroughly drunk by that point she’d needed his help standing and getting back to the car. When they got to the hotel he ended up needing to carry her up the stairs, something that she didn’t protest.

Drunk as she was, she found it funny, though she couldn’t explain why, called him a very good date, definitely worth going out with a second time.

Then she kissed him while he fumbled to unlock the door while keeping her from falling over.

It was a sloppy, drunk kiss, half on his lips, half on the side of his face, the smell of alcohol on her breath burning his nose.

They didn’t mention it the next morning when she was hungover and miserable.

Had it been progress or a step back?

For several days after that she avoided any physical contact with him, watching him warily, expecting him to say something.

He didn’t, so she had to be the one.

“It’s weird when you’re someone else,” she commented from the backseat as they drove to some scenic overlook to see the snow on the trees, “A lot of what you do is weird, ever since you came back.”

Was he supposed to agree or argue? He settled for a noncommittal sound, let her take it as she would.

“I wanted you to come back and be the brother I wanted you to be.”

His grip on the wheel tightened. Anger, not at her, not exactly, but at her memory of her brother.

“I guess I got that, but you came back wrong.”

He relaxed. Yes, yes he had, in so many ways.

“A lot happened,” a pointless statement, meaninglessly profound like a fortune cookie.

And why did that trigger a random memory, a girl, straight dark hair, glasses, freckles, leaning over a table in a Chinese restaurant, joking that everything written on the slips of paper in those cookies could be improved by adding ‘in bed’ to the end.

‘Expect great things. _In bed_.’

‘There will be a turn of events in your favor. _In bed_.’

‘You can make your own happiness. _In bed_.’

‘A lot happened. _In bed_.’

He smiled, a reflex. He’d been practicing smiling because she’d said it unnerved her how he seemed so serious all the time, so angry.

“See,” Dana sounded angry, “That’s what I’m talking about. You’re smiling. You never used to smile, at least not randomly. The only time you’d smile was when you were getting your way or you wanted something and thought it would help. Now you’re smiling because I asked you to. Which means you want something.”

So even when he did what she wanted he was doing the wrong thing.

Except she was right, he did want something.

The anger came back. He was pissed off at having let himself slip up, behave in a way that the original, the real Alex Mercer, would and doing so in such a transparent way that Dana would be mad at him for it.

He wished that Mercer was alive so he could kill him.

Again.

“You asked,” he said cautiously, trying to keep his anger at bay.

“I did,” she frowned, “You do stuff because I ask, but you haven’t asked me for anything yet. I keep waiting for the other shoe to fall. That and I’ve done so much stupid stuff lately, stuff I know you’re going to hold over my head. You’re saving it all up for when the time comes and...Fucking mind games. You always were a smug asshole so I guess that hasn’t changed.”

Hearing her badmouth her brother was fine, brought him a certain sadistic satisfaction, but having it aimed at him was something he didn’t want, though he shouldn’t have expected otherwise. As far as she was concerned he was her brother and she knew that man better than he did.

Better to bring the conversation back to more positive things, “You said I came back wrong.”

“Yeah, I did,” she laughed mirthlessly, “You’re fucked up, but not in the way you used to be. Even if you did half the shit that they say you did, you’re still, I don’t know, better than you were, more like I let myself pretend you were. If you came back the same jackass as ever it’d be fine because you’d be the same and it would all line up, but the way you are now it doesn’t work. You’re too nice, you didn’t make me feel like an idiot when I was drunk like that. I wanted you to be like this, but you never were.”

What the hell was he supposed to say to that? Clearly he could do no right.

Best to just ask then, “What do you want me to do?”

“I have no fucking clue.”

The rest of the drive took place in total silence.

The trees were pretty enough, he supposed. Dana said they were at least and who was he to judge?

It was his suggestion, made when things remained awkward between them, that she pick a disguise for him, a person for him to be and they pretend that he was that person, just for a few days, until things got better.

She agreed.

The disguise she picked was a surprise.

The young man who had been her ‘date’ and started all of the trouble.

“I said you might be good for a second date, so impress me,” she’d said when he stepped out of the hotel bathroom in the form of the young man.

He knew how to impress, had memories of all sorts of amazing date ideas ranging from the mundane to outrageous, but that wasn’t really what she wanted.

They went to a Dairy Queen and threw french-fries at the seagulls and watched them fight over the last scraps of his hamburger bun and laughed.

He found a park with walking trails and they want for a walk, she complained the whole time, he tried and failed to convince her that it was fun, so then they went to the movies and she got to pick what they saw.

The movie was utterly forgettable, but she enjoyed it if only because she liked one of the actors in every movie he was in.

Back at the hotel they were staying at they ate store bought chocolate chip cookie dough with spoons and watched television until she was tired enough to fall into an untroubled sleep.

A week of mundanity, the sort of things that they’d done previously, except he wasn’t Alex Mercer. It was still all a lie, but at least it was a new lie.

One he found preferable to the usual.

At the end of the week, the timeframe for the deception, she told him not to sleep on the floor, because that had been part of the illusion, he pretended to sleep for her benefit, laying still the whole night in a hotel room, rather than them driving on through the night.

She asked him to join her in bed.

So they slept together, fully clothed of course, but she asked him to hold her.

He rested listening to her breathing, feeling her against him, the soft, two note thud of her heart, the hissing rush of blood through her veins, memorizing every aspect of it. The sounds, feelings, little things that he was unable to replicate no matter what form he wore. His mimicry only went so far.

The next day she refused to look at him until he, in desperation, changed back to his default form of Alex Mercer.

His default form only because it was the first. They were all the same to him, Dana was the one who imagined the differences.

“It’s too confusing,” she said, “You’re a different person, but you’re still you.”

He’d agreed with that, wishing that she could see him as a different person so he could let go of the ghost he’d come to despise. Alex Mercer had ruined everything and continued to do so.

A new face for him, a new life for both of them would make things so much easier, but Dana continued to cling to the memory, the lie, of her brother.

A dozen different disguises in as many days while Dana tried to find one that she could tolerate. Old, young, male, female, it was all the same to him, but she sought meaning in each of them and he could put just enough inflection into each, just enough of a personality that wasn’t his, that she was willing to accept them all.

Until night fell, then she needed him to be him.

Except they were all him, something he had no clue how to make her understand.

Progress was made and lost by inches, so slight that there were times he couldn’t see it at all.

Like so many things in his short existence he found himself wondering if what happened in the end would be what he wanted or some new horror. Driving forward into the unknown was unpleasant, but it was away from what he hoped was something worse.

_Better the devil you know._

Not from a fortune cookie, but just as pointless, just as vague.

The devil he knew wasn’t better, but what about Dana?

Maybe she preferred the brother she had known rather than the person he was.

Or was trying to be.

He could only try to be a person after all. Just a virus pretending.

‘ _The cell that dared dream_.’

A misremembered line from a book, heard in the wrong voice. There was a negative, stomach churning connotation to it, but the memory was too faint, too small a scrap for him to find any meaning to it.

That was the problem trying to reconcile what he remembered with what he had experienced, he lacked the context that their original owners had given the memories and couldn’t give them his own.

Dana didn’t know what she wanted, but that was fine.

He didn’t know what he wanted either.

A dreary afternoon, checkout in an hour. They were watching the clock, counting down the minutes until they would need to pack up and leave the hotel, no destination in mind.

He was leaning against the window, listening to the rain. She was leaning next to him, listening to nothing.

Her fingers found his hand, wrapped around his wrist, looking for something that she couldn’t find.

She hadn’t slept well the previous night, had woken up screaming and he’d needed to hold her until she calmed down. Sometimes she slept naked and it had been one of those nights.

He held her, skin to skin contact, because she hated that he always seemed to wear the same thing. That night the jacket and hoodie and shirt had been absent.

She’d held him, pressed her head against his chest, listened to him breathing, a harsh gurgling rattle. Occasionally he’d cough and she’d wince.

It was fine, not her wincing, but the coughing and the noise. He needed lungs to breathe, but they weren’t quite perfect. Functional enough to do the job, but fluid tended to pool harmlessly in them from time to time, or maybe it was part of how they worked. Just because he had near complete control over how he could appear didn’t mean that he had any understanding of how he worked.

Last night she’d listened for a heartbeat, this morning she wasn’t holding his hand, she was feeling for a pulse.

She wouldn’t find one, it was too fast, with too many redundancies, a constant rush through his veins, if he had veins. Sometimes it looked that way, but he couldn’t be sure if they were functional or just part of the mimicry.

“What did they do to you?” She looked at him, fearful, “How bad is it?”

She clung to the notion of a ‘they’, that there was someone else to blame other than the man whose face she was looking at.

He answered in the most direct way.

When his flesh began to shift beneath her fingers she jerked back with a gasp. His hands shifted to claws, which she’d seen before. Then claws flowed and shifted to blades, which split into jumbles of barbs and ropes of coiling tendons, which condensed into dense, clubbed massed of bone that softened into bulging, shifting muscle that in turn hardened into serrated plates of armor. The armor spread, covering his whole body, covering any trace of humanity with a spined, black carapace.

That was what the imaginary they had done to him, how bad it was.

She screamed, though the process was no different than his usual changing disguises, which she watched more often than not now.

It was the end result that was different, that had terrified her.

He changed back and it was time to leave.

That day they didn’t talk much.

Several days later he was in a form that she didn’t like, but requested he use with greater and greater frequency, that of a rather angry looking man, not Alex Mercer, but a Blackwatch soldier whose name and rank and anything else that didn’t matter had been forgotten. Alex knew that he was Blackwatch, that he had been a momentary disguise to get from one place to another, chosen as a matter of convenience. Wrong place at the wrong time, maybe he’d deserved it, maybe he hadn’t.

The now nameless soldier was out of uniform, in civilian clothing because Dana had insisted that he have actual clothing so he’d learned to not replicate clothing when he changed into his disguises.

At first she’d looked away, but now there were times that she watched.

This morning she’d watched.

Dana thought he looked like an asshole when he appeared as this particular man and said as much, but she still requested it.

It was warm, they were sitting on the beach, ‘borrowing’ a vacation home that wasn’t in use. Dana was reading, working on her tan. He was staring out at the water.

She looked up from her book, “You look angry.”

“I’m not,” he was telling the truth. Blackwatch or not, he had no particular animosity towards the form he wore, without context it was just a body and face. Alex Mercer had context so he was easier to hate, “But I can change if you want.”

Because sometimes changing who he was proved to be easier than trying to fake a smile.

“No,” she shook her head violently, swallowed nervously, “Because I’m going to need to hate you for this.”

He didn’t think it was hate though, not that night when she came out of the shower told him to undress and lay down on the bed.

It was progress of a most unexpected nature.

This was _not_ something that she would do with her brother.

Maybe the cursing him out, the smacking him across the face, but not the mounting him, rubbing herself, desperately against him.

She was lonely and frightened and angry and the face he wore, the mannerisms he tried to affect meant that he might as well be a stranger to her. It was anonymous, just a one night stand.

Just to see what would happen, what she would do, he willed his body to react. Was it what she wanted or would it horrify her?

She rode him and he pretended to enjoy it the way he was supposed to, that it was something more than just a minor alteration to his form, the same as tensing a muscle or growing claws, less even.

She screamed and cried. He grimaced and moaned, grasped her breasts and squeezed, careful not to be too rough, even though she wanted it that way.

It was with rage, not passion that she ground against him as he thrust into her, slow and measured for fear of hurting her.

He expected her to notice something wrong, that it was utterly mechanical on his part, and stop but she didn’t, not until she’d worked herself to a joyless, unsatisfying climax and exhausted herself.

He pretended to climax, gripping the sheets, tensing and thrusting harder, grabbing her and pressing her against his chest.

Her heart was racing a mile a minute, frantic, her eyes wide and unfocused.

“Fuck you,” she spat, climbing off of him and staggering out of the room.

She hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong because it was all wrong.

The next day she didn’t have any comment about the face he wore, that he was still in the same form as the night before. Instead she told him to stop smiling.

He hadn’t been smiling.

Neither of them said anything more about it until a month or two later.

He’d been cycling through disguises at random for the past few days because she hadn’t expressed any preference, at least not out loud. He could tell by her actions, the way she behaved around him based on his appearance that, at the time, what she wanted him to be was a man that appeared close to her in age.

Having only each other for company for so long meant that he was learning to pick up on her moods, what she would and wouldn’t talk about. She remained unable to read him, something she frequently complained about. It was an imperfection in his mimicry, the inability to respond in the proper, human way, to situations.

What he had learned was that she preferred when he was male, there were limits to what she could accept, she’d told him.

What she could accept included was claws and blades and armor, all of which she’d asked to see several times since. The purpose of it seemed to be to frighten herself, scare her away from him for a time.

Early morning and she was giving him that look.

What would it be? Claws were the usual, but his armored form was also a common request.

Increasingly common.

He allowed himself to relax, his form starting to lose cohesion in anticipation of the changes he would will upon himself.

“The blond guy from last week,” she said with a grimace, “He looked like a douche, but the way he acted, the way you acted when you were him. I want that.”

As had become the routine he undressed to change. Dana watched, reaching out while his form was still partially shifting ropes of red and black. It took more and more to frighten her away from him lately.

Progress.

Waiting for his skin to stop moving beneath her fingers she added, almost as an afterthought, “Also, I want you to be on top this time.”

One so many levels progress.

Another step away from being Alex Mercer and towards being himself, whoever, whatever, that was.

As the blond man he was a considerate lover, plenty of foreplay, focused mostly on her, though she tried to be considerate as well, as though it made a difference, as though it was about anything other than her.

He was gentle with hands and mouth, asking her if she enjoyed it at every step of the way, making her smile and ask what he wanted.

He kissed her, not because it was what he wanted, but because it seemed like the right thing to do, what the blond man might have done.

When she was ready, wet and begging him to stop teasing her, even though she clearly wanted him to keep going, as she’d asked, he was the one on top.

She wrapped her legs around him, arms too, and held him tight as she came.

_Once is a mistake. Twice is a pattern._

“I’m bored,” she sighed from her usual spot in the backseat, “Let’s do something crazy.”

Even if she hadn’t mentioned earlier that the form he was in was the kind of guy who looked like he might do something crazy on a dare or a bet or just for the hell of it he would have known what she meant by the tone of her voice.

The look in her eyes.

“I’ll start looking for a motel,” he offered.

“Pull over,” she demanded.

_Three times is a habit._

He had forms for her, lies and disguises to be whatever she needed.

Rarely her brother.

Occasionally friends.

Often a series of lovers, some of them only once, though favorites would be brought back for a repeat.

During it all he learned what she liked, what she disliked and what she only pretended to dislike. She tried to ask him what he wanted, but it didn’t work that way. He couldn’t tell her that none of it meant anything to him other than making her happy. He knew what she expected him to feel, what a human man would have felt, but it wasn’t there. So he lied and offered suggestions based on what he knew she would want.

He always said the right thing, did the right thing.

Because it was about her and because he could, as he grew to better understand her, what felt good for, he began to modify his form in slight ways. It was always in the heat of the moment, when she was too caught up to notice the change in length or girth, that he was filling her more completely, hitting the right spot again and again until she was screaming whatever name she’d decided to call him that time.

She had so many different names for him, not for the faces, but for how he was supposed to act when he wore them.

Finally she was starting to learn.

As the two of them grew closer the distance between him and her brother grew farther.

He was Alex Mercer less and less often and it was a relief.

“Because it’s safer,” he’d justify if he felt she needed to hear it, but at the same time he thought that she understood.

It made him happy.

Just like making her happy made him happy.

She was what mattered.

Hearing her laugh, giggle.

Squeal when he did that thing with his tongue that she liked so much.

That thing that shouldn’t have been possible.

One of many things he did that weren’t humanly possible.

She rarely kissed him, and only once tried to suck him off. Because he’d tasted wrong, she told him. Yet another thing he couldn’t mimic, couldn’t learn how to, though he’d learned how she tasted, every inch of her body, because he couldn’t help it. The feel of her against him wasn’t pleasurable as it should have been to a human, but he still enjoyed it. His skin was hypersensitive when they were together, not to pleasure, but to her. Taste and smell and touch became intertwined. It did help him though, running his hands over her, tasting the excitement in her sweat, seeing the heat of her as well as feeling it, all letting him know when she was ready.

It wasn’t exactly that he lost himself in her when they were together, it was that nothing else mattered to him. In those moments he still didn’t completely understand what he was – not human was the obvious answer, but it didn’t matter. He was most sure of who he was.

Not Alex Mercer.

Eventually she realized how focused he was when they made love or fucked or whatever it was that she was in the mood for on a given night, that his typically preternatural awareness had narrowed, and she tricked him.

Riding him, eyes closed, crying out, “Harder, harder, harder!”

Then she jumped off and caught him in the act, saw the utterly inhuman anatomy that he’d been using to pleasure her. Because it wasn’t supposed to be something she was supposed to see the wrongness was blatant, ridges and bumps, a slight bulge near the base to hit that one spot at just the right angle, black and red veins writhing across it because she liked the feel of their moving, even if she didn’t know what it was.

She looked, eyes wide.

She looked at him and laughed.

“You are fucking messed up,” she smiled, “But I am too. I’d have to be.”

Then she got right back on.

If he had ever made love to her with actual passion, rather than almost meditative concentration, it had been that night. On some level Dana was not afraid of what he was, what he could do.

Or at least some of what he could do. A small step had been taken towards ending the lie. Perhaps eventually they could move onto the next step, deciding how much truth she actually wanted to know.

After that night Alex Mercer became just another form in the rotation of faces and names he cycled through. He was who she turned to when there was something she needed to talk about, typically what had happened on Manhattan, the atrocities committed by Blackwatch and Gentech.

If he could remember anything new, anything about before.

For a time she would tell him stories about their childhood, memories twisted by the innocence of youth and nostalgia, making Alex Mercer into something more pleasant than he had been. Even in there though, there had been threads of truth, things he had done that she tried to remember as youthful mischief and mostly harmless pranks. She remembered him as having a sense of humor.

He began to ask leading questions.

Sprawled in the backseat of the car she would look up from the book she was reading and tell him a story about a trip to the mall together where she had gotten lost.

The memory was such a common, near universal, that he wondered if it was someone everyone remembered, if somehow every single child somehow managed to get lost while out shopping with their parents. Was it hardwired into them?

Listening to the story with the wrong sort of fascination he still managed to nod, smile, or shake his head at the right parts. When it was over he asked if she remembered him being happy when they found her or if he’d had anything to do with her getting lost.

She stumbled over the answer, but managed to spin it into something it hadn’t been.

Still, he’d managed to plant a seed of doubt. It was a horrible thing to do, but he wanted to see if they had reached the point where she could be angry at her brother, but not at him.

In the motel they stayed at that night he sat on the chair, staring at the wall, thinking about nothing, still wearing the form of Alex Mercer because she hadn’t asked him to change. She paced the room, restless, full of the manic energy that came from being angry.

“Don’t say terrible things about,” she paused and in that pause his pulse would have quickened, his heart would have leapt, “Yourself. You weren’t a bad person, okay?”

That there had been a pause at all.

So he let her tell her stories about her brother, made the appropriate response based on the face and name he wore. As Alex Mercer he didn’t comment, but when he was anyone else he could.

There had been a few fights from that, a few names and faces taken out of the rotation when he pushed too hard, but they were just names and faces, nothing of value or significance. It was the end goal that mattered, getting to the point where he didn’t need to continue to pretend that Alex Mercer hadn’t been a vile, reprehensible excuse for a human being. He was trying to be a better person, to Dana at least, because even if she could, out of desperation, ignore it, he wasn’t all that good at being a person.

_Human versus humane._

The start of a lecture, college maybe? Or had it been at a church? He had memories of both.

It was a thought he quickly dismissed as not worth dwelling on. Experience told him he wasn’t one or the other.

They couldn’t settle down, find a place to have a normal life because she would always be in too much danger unless they went somewhere she would never agree to and he couldn’t manage normal. He could fake it for her, but anyone else wouldn’t have the same need that would blind them to the countless little things that were off. No matter how good he got at his mimicry he was aware that when they went out together, spent any length of time around other people he would get _looks_. They weren’t seeing her, the sister of a terrorist, they were seeing him and on some level sensing that something wasn’t right.

The uncanny valley was the term he pulled from memories. He was right on the edge of it, but it was the wrong edge.

Dana didn’t see that.

She saw what she wanted to.

What she needed.

Late night.

A resort hotel, splurging for her birthday.

It had been a mistake.

Fireworks were going off somewhere nearby. Twinkling colored lights filling the sky, booms resonating in his chest.

And hers.

They retreated to their room, drew the curtains, but she didn’t turn on the television.

Instead she grabbed his arm, her grip tasting of fear and anxiety and other things. She looked at him with wild horror.

“The monster, be the monster.”

Given the state she was in he doubted that frightening her any more would help, but he did as told, his body hardening with plates of armor, twisting spines and arcing patterns of not-quite-bone.

This time she didn’t push away or flee or look at him in disgust. There was disgust, of course, but it was aimed inward, an emotion he was all too familiar with in himself. To see it in her was fascinating.

She traced her fingers over the geography of his body, reading a map of unfamiliar terrain by touch. Every bump, every ridge, was investigated. His face, or lack thereof seemed to hold special interest for her.

“How do you see?” She wondered, “You can see, right?”

He nodded, plates of armor sliding smoothly against each other as he spoke, because it was a question where she wanted an explanation as well as an answer. He had learned to read her tone well enough.

“There’s something here,” he gestured at the upper half of where his face should have been, “I don’t know how it works exactly, but it’s mostly heat and shapes and movement.”

An explanation made him less frightening. He could have gone into more details, that like the hunters he detected the world through a combination of thermosensitive cells where his eyes should have been and what he had come to believe was echolocation. Why movement was especially noticeable was a mystery to him, suggesting some sort of rudimentary eye structure existing, but he hadn’t made sense of it yet, didn’t care to.

She ran her fingers across his face in flashes of warmth, her exhalations lingered in clouds, washing over him.

He could taste her interest, her intent.

Fine details were a blur when he was like this, but when she hesitated he thought he could see disappointment on her face.

She was sincere in what she seemed to want then.

Armor softened, flesh writhed and shifted and then hardened again, the same process as always, simple as any other change of form. Visibly wrong from the start, inhuman, but with all the little details that gave her so much pleasure.

Again she ran her fingers over ridges and lines, tracing forms far more familiar to her.

He could see her smirk, fleeting and ghostlike, but she didn’t say whatever thought crossed her mind.

She had the monster, her monster, all of it, but what was she going to do now?

Watching her and waiting was fine for him, but she wanted more, expected more.

She put her hands on her hips, “What are you waiting for?”

There was anger in her tone, but not in her body language, not in the way she was looking at him, not in the taste of her skin when he grabbed her and forced her down onto the bed.

If this was what she thought she wanted he’d give it to her and the monster, as she called it, got taken out of the rotation of forms she asked from him it was fine. It was just another form, possibly more practical than some, but one created in haste out of necessity back when fights had been constant and of no more importance to him than any other form he had worn.

Claws, short and hooked and grown on a whim for this occasion, tore her clothing, ripped her shirt off, cut through the straps of her bra.

She fought, carefully at first, with no real strength or purpose until she realized that there was no need to be careful with him. The only thing she had to worry about was hurting herself, which she did, once when she slapped him across the armored plate that was his face.

An explosion of harmless warmth, gone in a flash.

She winced and shook her hand.

He hesitated, loosened his hold on her.

She made no attempt to free herself, instead she used the opportunity to carefully line up a kick that landed on his stomach and used the force to try and push away.

He let her so he could grab her by her cutoff shorts, claws hooking into denim, grazing against her legs, but never breaking the skin. The sound of denim tearing was the only noise other than her little hisses and gasps of exertion. She fought in silence, proving that it was a game, or maybe self-deception.

He was a master of that, but the way she carried it out was different.

He pretended to be human.

She pretended that she didn’t want what she wanted, as though that would make it alright.

Her deception was a more enjoyable one.

Claws vanished as he spread her legs and forced his way into her.

That was when she screamed.

Screamed and wrapped her legs around him to press more tightly against him, ground against the raised seams in his armor that had formed purely for that purpose.

She thrashed and struggled and hit him, but never once let go.

In the end she threw her arms around him, her cries muffled against his shoulder as she came hard enough that he could feel the tremors thought her whole body.

The monster became a frequent request after that.

It was hard for him to tell since he didn’t keep track of favorites, but it may have been the most popular.

Though there were times he wondered, he never asked why.

Doing so might ruin things.

Besides, it meant that she, on some level, accepted that he wasn’t human. That understanding was a relief, meaning that it would make eventual revelations less horrifying.

Implying that eventual revelations would be possible.

All they did was travel, though if she had given any indication of wanting to settle down he would have done so in an instant, impossible as it may have been. On some level it was because she understood that she was in danger, that if someone recognized her she would never be safe again. With it assumed that she was dead like so many others, that he was dead, they were safe. If she was discovered to be alive it would be enough for it to be assumed that he was alive as well and then everything would spiral out of control. He didn't know how, but he knew it would. Blackwatch would never give up, never stop if they had any reason to suspect that he was still out there, somewhere.

They were in danger and a danger to each other.

Maybe some time, years down the road, probably ten or twenty judging by the way of things, they would be safe and settling down would be more realistic, but until then aimless wandering was for the best.

The monster, as she called, it wasn’t just another of her lovers. There were times she asked for him to take that form and then asked him to lay next to her, to hold her as she slept as she would any of the other forms she preferred.

Was this what he’d been looking for from her? To be accepted as a monster?

Alex Mercer had been a monster in everything but appearance.

It was it galled him that she still called him Alex, still, on some level, saw some aspect of him as being her brother.

Always traveling meant that there were endless opportunities for diversion.

Driving past a sign, zoo next exit, Dana looked up and smiled, “We’ve got nothing better to do, let’s go and then let’s get ice cream.”

It was winter, but there was no reason not to.

The day was gray and dreary, the sort that Dana would complain made her depressed. He looked at her, she didn’t seem depressed, but maybe that was why she wanted to go to the zoo, to cheer up. Mixed as his memories were on such things, the majority were cheery. Not all though, so that was a concern.

And of course he had no memories of going to the zoo with Dana when they were young because he wasn’t her brother, had never been her brother and by the time the virus had infected Alex Mercer, when he had infected Alex Mercer, the man was past remembering much at all.

He took the exit, followed the signs and followed a small road past farmland into a more wooded area where the road was blocked by a gate, chained shut and locked.

‘Sorry, Closed for the Winter’ the sign read, then underneath told that limited hours would start in April.

“What kind of zoo closes for the winter?” Dana griped as though she took personal offense from the place’s strange hours.

A small one, off the highway, near nothing else of interest was apparently the answer.

He asked her what she wanted to do now. All she did was shrug.

His choice then. Frustrating because the only reason they had ended up where they were was because of a wrong turn. Traffic and Dana, on principle, refusing to take the quickest route back onto their journey to nowhere meant that they had a much longer drive ahead of them than they could have.

He had no particular memories of the area they were in, no particular desire to look for anything to do, but she was bored.

Winter was always the worst after the holidays when they ended up still in some place cold. After this they were going to drive south to where it was warm, get away from the snow, which had overstayed its welcome. They were a long way from Florida at the moment, which would be their eventual destination, by way of an even more circuitous route than normal thanks to that wrong turn.

“I’ll think of something,” he said at last.

Which was how they ended up in a pet store, staring at the enormous displays the place had. It was kind of like a zoo, he’d said when they pulled into the parking lot.

More than he’d expected too, the place apparently specialized in exotics, more fish than animals, but that was fine. They walked up and down the rows of tanks, Dana occasionally calling him over to look at particularly colorful or ugly fish, asking him why anyone would want to keep something that looked like that as a pet.

To him they were all just fish, no matter how they looked.

One of the largest tanks in the place was like a miniature coral reef, names and prices helpfully written on the glass in front of the different pieces of coral.

There were fish in there as well, something that looked tie-dyed was picking its way over the rocks, eating little bugs as it went. Dana watched the little fish while he watched the corals.

He wasn’t sure if he did or didn’t like them.

Another tank had been full of fleshy, pink corals that moved on their own, pulsing and grasping with clusters of feathery looking appendages.

They reminded him of the hydras bursting through the pavement during the worst parts of the outbreak. The corals had even begun to overgrow the stones they’d been attached to, spreading over the plastic grid that held the rocks. One of them even clung to the glass.

The corals were unnatural, some soft and boneless, branching like flaccid, leathery trees, others a thin layer of bright red or purple or green flesh growing over a skeleton. Clusters of ruffled mushrooms, the pinks and maroons of diseased organs, fields of luridly colored sunflowers, no larger than a dime. Tentacles with almost glowing tips swayed in the current.

Memories disagreed on if they were plants or animals.

A bug crawled across one of the flowers and it closed.

When the flower opened the bug was gone and a little dot that had been barely noticeable at the center of the petals stuck outward, a pair of pursed lips.

They were animals then, because when he looked closer the mushroom things had mouths as well, and their edges curled when the fish touched them.

Life growing on top of life growing on top of life, flesh and bone in unnatural, impossible configurations, little things crawling and dying all over it.

The tank was Manhattan during the outbreak, his own body mid transformation.

If it was a flashback that he was having it was the most detached one imaginable. No fear, no shakes, no overwhelming anything, just a small smile because he’d gotten better at smiling when confronted with absurdity. Feigning amusement was the human thing to do.

Dana smiled back at him and he knew he’d done right.

“Look at that one,” she said, pointing to a fat looking orange and white barred fish, “Isn’t he adorable?”

He looked at the fish and knew he was noticing the wrong details. Its mouth turned down in a frown and the angle of its eyes looked mean. Anthropomorphizing was another thing that he’d always been bad at.

_Stop anthropomorphizing._

A frequent reprimand to someone back when they had still been an intern, before…

She mistook his smile for agreement.

Another fish passed too close to it and the orange fish darted forward, chased it away and then retreated into a cluster of the pink and glowing green tentacles.

Watching it a pattern became apparent. It would swim to other areas of the tank, but would always return to that one particular coral even though there were others like it. The others were labeled ‘torch coral’, which was appropriate, and were for sale, but not the one where the fish lived.

Symbiosis, but what did each half get out of it?

The fish had a home, acted like it was protecting the coral. That wasn’t it though, nothing went near the other, fishless, torch corals, not even the bugs and they were all fine.

The tank was a city of flesh and bone, the nightmare of the virus, a massive living thing, full of life and Dana didn’t see it, otherwise she wouldn’t have watched it with such fascination, smiling, telling him to look closer as a snail slid across the front of the tank. The snail was large enough that he could see the bristles of its radula scraping against the glass, teeth amid boneless flesh.

Apparently unnatural things were fine when they were small and in the water behind glass.

No wonder so many memories revealed that people were afraid of the ocean.

The fish lived in the coral and the coral wasn’t for sale because of the fish.

Nothing in common between the two, but they were a home for each other.

They left the pet store, couldn’t find an ice cream parlor and went to a grocery store instead. There they bought a whole gallon of chocolate ice cream with chocolate swirls and brownie chunks and ate it between the two of them.

And that night when Dana started to ask for the monster she stopped, corrected herself.

“I want you.”


End file.
